Will The Real Palestine Please Stand Up?

Ilya Meyer // Part of the “solution” to the entire Middle East morass that US President Obama reckons is the key to the outbreak of world peace, universal love and spontaneous outbursts of “Kumbaya” being sung in Hebrew, Arabic and Persian, is the evasive Palestinian-Israeli peace, that elusive chimera that if caught will solve all our problems in single stroke.

So here are a few truths that we all need to internalise so we can all help President Obama realise his dream. You may think this is difficult, that no, we can’t achieve it. But the fact is, YES WE CAN. In fact, we even have an entire electoral campaign built around that simple, universal truth. A truth so simple yet so condensed that experts in Washington are still trying, six years later, to ascertain what it actually means at its very heart.

There are no prospects for peace anywhere in the entire Middle East unless Palestinian Arabs get a capital city (they don’t yet have a state and they’re killing each other over who should rule that state, but hey, who’s quibbling) which is in the heart of Jerusalem. Let me explain: Jerusalem is the Israeli capital city that none other than Barack Obama (yes, this same one, not a clone) insisted in the run-up to his election must remain the undivided and sole capital of the State of Israel.

It is apparently this lack of peace between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs – and the troubling lack of a Palestinian Arab capital inside the Israeli capital – that is fuelling sectarian Sunni-on-Shia violence in Lebanon. And Syria. And Iraq. And Yemen.

Equally clearly, it is this lack of peace between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs that is fuelling the rise of Boko Haram and Al Shabab in Africa.

And of course it is the same reason why Muslim immigrants are perpetually displeased in countries such as Britain, France, Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Australia – in fact, the entire world where they have settled. What is confusing and very annoying, however, is why Hindu, Sikh, Jewish, Chinese, Filipino, Polish, Rumanian and other immigrants insist on swiftly acclimatising to and fully embracing their new lives in these very same countries. That’s REALLY annoying and needs to be studied, but that’s a separate issue.

Unsurprisingly, it is the lack of peace between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs that is prompting Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmud Abbas, currently in the eleventh (11th) year of his 5-year presidency, to threaten the Jewish state of Israel with terrorism, war and even legal action for alleged war crimes – by which he means Israel’s attacks against Gaza, the Hamas-controlled enclave from which Hamas has fired more than 14,000 missiles into exclusively civilian population centres in Israel – schools, apartment houses, shops, buses, kindergartens, hospitals.

All of which explains, equally clearly, why this same Abbas is now entreating the Arab world to bomb that same Gaza – because Hamas ousted Abbas from power in a bloody coup almost a decade back. Of course, he doesn’t want to threaten the Arab world with terrorism, war and legal action if they do bomb Gaza. That treatment is only reserved for Jews. And before you can ask – no, this kind of deliberate selection of Jews and only Jews for negative treatment is NOT anti-Semitic: some of Abbas’s best friends are Jews…

All the above is of course perfectly clear to any right-thinking individual. What isn’t clear, at least to this writer – and I would really love US President Barack Obama to comment on this – is how this Palestinian Fatah call to bomb Palestinian Hamas can be squared with the US President’s solution, since both Fatah and Hamas are in a coalition government with each other. And Obama assures us that the only solution for peace in the entire Middle East is for Israel to make peace with the Palestinian Arabs.

Because of course the logical question is, which Arabs? Those Hamas Arabs who bomb Jews in their homes? Or those Fatah Arabs who bomb Israel for daring to bomb those Hamas Arabs who bomb Jews in their homes? Or those Fatah Arabs who implore the rest of the Arab world to bomb those Hamas Arabs who kill Fatah Arabs – but only for that crime, not because they also bomb Jews in their homes?

In short, which Palestinian Arabs are we supporting?

President Obama, I’m asking you this question because you’ve constantly assured us you have all the answers. We’ve seen how right you’ve been so far in Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Russia.

So please, President Obama, would you please just help us out here? We could do with all the help you can offer. But don’t take time out from your busy schedule with Iran – securing that watertight deal, which gives us peace in our time, naturally comes first.

And don’t mind what Israel does in the meantime as you sip a cup of mint tea in Tehran and savour the historic signing ceremony. Israel won’t be bothering you at all after this.

Because Israel will be too busy preparing for the war of survival you have just foisted on the Jewish state as she scrambles to defend itself from spreading Iranian Mullah hegemony.

What hegemony, you ask Mr President? Look at a map: Iran, then Lebanon, then Syria, then Iraq. And now Yemen.

In all this raging conflict and geopolitical turbulence, it’s reassuring to know that we still have the solution within our grasp. The solution you so rightly underscore as the only issue worth discussing, Mr President: peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. But not peace among the Palestinian Arabs, or their backers, or the vast Arab and wider Muslim hinterland to the north, south or east…